The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

etween factories and clocks, and there is a connection between
colonial imperialism and factories. There is also a connection
between telling Indian tales in chronological sequences and the
American tendency to fit Indians into the slots they have
prepared for us. The Indians used to be the only inhabitants of
the Americas, but times change. Having perceived us as
belonging to history, they are free to emote over us, to re-create
us in their history-based understanding, and dismiss our present
lives as archaic and irrelevant to the times.
Not surprisingly, both of McNickle’s novels, Wind from an
Enemy Sky and The Surrounded, are about the loss of hope for
the Indians. Both protagonists are caught in a web of actions and
reactions that can be understood by comparing the cultural
understandings of the Indians and those of the whites. Both books
imply that while the Indians are sincere and much more
humanely intelligent than the whites around them, their tribal
sense of propriety and timing leads them into deadly conflict
with the whites. Mourning Dove’s protagonist in Cogewea, the
Half-Blood suffers a happier fate: her experience with the wily
white man is devastating, but it could have been avoided had she
understood the situation as the grandmother does, ceremonially.
But neither Cogewea nor any other Indian in Mourning Dove’s
novel is murderer or murdered, and Cogewea herself finally
understands the true point of the Stemteema’s teachings. Nor is
Mourning Dove as comfortable with chronological ordering as
McNickle. While Cogewea, the Half-Blood is told in
chronological sequence, Mourning Dove makes massive
interruptions for sociopolitical ruminations. These stop the flow
of the story, to be sure, but they also point to Mourning Dove’s
uneasiness with the simple ordering and interpreting of events
that chronological organization imposes.
The contemporary novels of Leslie Marmon Silko and James
Welch are composed of a series of short vignettes. Welch sticks